| James
Tate is the perpetual enfant terrible of American poetry.
For the past thirty years his strange, provocative, and often disturbing
poems have fascinated critics and fellow-poets. Even now, in his
mid-fifties, after having won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book
Award, and most of the establishment's other awards, even now after
having been appointed full professor at a major state university,
Tate still seems like an outsider–a brilliant, troubled youth
who has never settled down.
Tate
came to prominence very early. In 1967 his first collection, The
Lost Pilot, won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets competition.
Now, in America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric
liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting
a Social Security pension. (I recently read one avant-garde
anthology of "younger" poets in which the average age of the contributor
was 61 & 1/2.) But James Tate was perhaps the youngest writer
ever to win the Yale competition in the 8 decades of its existence.
When the book appeared, he was only 23 and still a student in the
University of Iowa's graduate writing program.
Tate's
debut made an enormous impression–at least on other writers.
The Yale Younger Poets series had not yet lost its editorial cachet.
The Ivy League series was then still the most influential–and
mainstream–introduction a new American poet could have. In
the late Sixties American poetry was ostentatiously reinventing
itself. Experimentalism was the sign of artistic authenticity, and
ambitious writers were eagerly exploring new avenues of expression.
With
The Lost Pilot Tate struck an unmistakably new and original
note. He had, in fact, successfully accomplished something that
many other poets had been trying–mostly without conspicuous
success. Tate had domesticated surrealism. He had taken this foreign
style, which had almost always seemed slightly alien in English–even
among its most talented practitioners like Charles Simic and Donald
Justice–and had made it sound not just native but utterly down-home.
One
of the provocative ironies of twentieth century literature is that
during the Thirties and Forties when surrealism was transforming
the landscape of European and Latin American poetry, it never took
root in the United States. Surrealism changed poetry from Sweden
to Bolivia, from Greece to Costa Rica. It even found a foothold
in England. But in America it initially created no significant body
of work. Why did the self-proclaimed style of the future make such
a minimal impression in the land of the modern?
There
were, of course, many reasons why surrealism was so slow in coming
to America–not the least of which was that the U.S. already
had a thriving Modernist movement. With Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot,
Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, and William Carlos Williams all
active, who needed Andrè Breton to be modern? But there was,
I suggest, another, more curious reason that no one ever mentions.
My own guess for the main reason that American poetry–and
painting and sculpture–did not initially pounce on surrealism
was that Hollywood got there first. And not just Hollywood–it's
worse than that–it was the animated cartoon.
America's
first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer,
and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though
we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by
children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These
men took–quite literally–the principles of surrealism
and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily
clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape
to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher," moviegoers
of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully
than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this
day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably
Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah
of "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When
the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media
comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently
chic? No, American surrealism had to wait until the Fleischer
studio had gone bankrupt, Tex Avery had died, and an older, safer
Walt Disney began hosting a Sunday evening family TV hour.
American
surrealism also had to wait for another generation–a generation
that had grown up on cartoons and movies. It required writers who
did not necessarily see high culture and popular culture in opposition.
This shift in sensibility finally arrived in the Sixties. The new
surrealism also reflected a growing internationalism in American
poetry, an interest in modern poetry outside the English-speaking
world. Sophisticated poets like James Wright, Robert Bly, and Donald
Justice studied and translated foreign modernists. They explored
surrealistic techniques as a way of broadening their own imaginative
range. A generation younger, Tate (who was a student of Donald justice
at Iowa) approached the new style in a less intellectual and scholarly
way. Neither a translator nor a critic, he worked by instinct and
obsession.
In
The Lost Pilot Tate usually created a clear narrative line
in his poems. Only as the details of the story and situation unfolded
in an increasingly bizarre fashion, did one realize that the speaker
inhabited some private landscape of dream or hallucination. Although
Tate claimed he often wrote in a trance, his poems gave no hint
of automatic writing. The poems were tightly constructed. The language
clean and sharply chiseled. The style was not from the cafes of
Paris or Barcelona but from the workshops of Iowa City. What Tate
borrowed from surrealism was the use of dream logic and free association.
Often he would incorporate these principles into something very
similar to the standard confessional poem as in the title poem of
his first collection, "The Lost Pilot." This poem was dedicated
to Tate's father, an American pilot who was killed in the Second
World War at the age of 22–the same age, significantly, that
the poet was when the book had been accepted for publication.
The
Lost Pilot
for
my father, 1922-1944
Your
face did not rot
like
the others–the co-pilot,
for
example, I saw him
yesterday.
His face is corn-
mush:
his wife and daughter,
the
poor ignorant people, stare
as
if he will compose soon.
He
was more wronged than Job.
But
your face did not rot
like
the others–it grew dark,
and
hard like ebony;
the
features progressed in their
distinction.
If I could cajole
you
to come back for an evening,
down
from your compulsive
orbiting,
I would touch you,
read
your face as Dallas,
your
hoodlum gunner, now,
with
the blistered eyes, reads
his
braille editions. I would
touch
your face as a disinterested
scholar
touches an original page.
However
frightening, I would
discover
you, and I would not
turn
you in; I would not make
you
face your wife, or Dallas,
or
the co-pilot, Jim. You
could
return to your crazy
orbiting,
and I would not try
to
fully understand what
it
means to you. All I know
is
this: when I see you,
as
I have seen you at least
once
every year of my life,
spin
across the wilds of the sky
like
a tiny, African god,
I
feel dead. I feel as if I were
the
residue of a stranger's life,
that
I should pursue you.
My
head cocked toward the sky,
I
cannot get off the ground,
and,
you, passing over again,
fast,
perfect, and unwilling
to
tell me that you are doing
well,
or that it was mistake
that
placed you in that world,
and
me in this; or that misfortune
placed
these worlds in us.
Although
critics immediately noted the surreal elements in The Lost Pilot,
surely one reason why the book proved so accessible was its autobiographical
qualities. The late Sixties marked the height of Confessional poetry,
the unabashed style of autobiographical verse that is still the
mainstream of American poetry. In reading The Lost Pilot,
it was not hard to discern the psychological forces driving the
author's imagination.
James
Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1943. His father, the
lost pilot of the book's title, had been killed on a combat mission
over Germany when the poet was only five months old. Tate had never
known his father–except in dreams, borrowed memories, and the
imagination. Knowing this one biographical fact gave the title poem
enormous resonance, and it provided a personal context in which
to read the rest of the book as the poems of a restless young man
in desperate search of his own identity.
If
that initial autobiographical disclosure helped critics emotionally
identify with Tate's work, it was the last bit of self-revelation
they would receive. As Tate's subsequent work appeared year after
year in prolific profusion, it proved completely impersonal. Perhaps
in rejection of the excesses of the fashionable Confessional mode,
perhaps from a strong native sense of reticence, Tate revealed his
dreams and nightmares, his fears and desires–but he never shared
further details of his waking life. Although his career had been
launched with the personal myth of the lost pilot, no further public
persona was created behind the poems. While Anne Sexton, Sylvia
Plath, John Berryman, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka,
and Brother Antoninus all became recognizable public personalities,
James Tate became invisible behind his poems.
Thanks
to books like The Lost Pilot, surrealism became one of the
mainstream styles of American poetry in the 1970s. Indeed, it became
the most influential style among male poets. (The women had
more public issues of feminism to address.) Older writers like Robert
Bly, James Wright, and Donald Hall switched styles to create the
"deep image" poem. Although most of them had once composed in rhyme
and meter, they now wrote minimalist free verse full of mysterious
images drawn from the natural world–a style that was soon wickedly
nicknamed "the stones and bones" school of poetry. Yugoslavian-born
Charles Simic and Canadian-born Mark Strand recreated an Eastern-European
style poem convincingly in American English–spare, quiet but
luminous. But there was also a younger, more swaggering school led
by Tate that practiced a jazzy and absurdist brand of surrealism.
The point of this new style sometimes seemed to be creating a situation
or sequence of images as evocatively bizarre and disturbingly creepy
as possible. The tone was at once understated and aggressive. Everything,
especially violent or depressing subjects, was presented with dark
and detached humor. You can get a sense of the style just from the
titles of a few early Tate poems:
Rape
in the Engineering Building
The
Wheelchair Butterfly
The
Eagle Exterminating Company
Frivolous
Blind Death Child
The
Hostile Philharmonic Orchestra
The
Indian Undertaker
One
critic dubbed this irreverent new approach "conversational surrealism."
Whatever it was called, however, the style soon became the rage
in writing programs. Still in his mid-twenties, Tate became a cult
hero for many young American poets.
Being
influential, however, often means being resented. And–at least
in regards to schools of poetry–the sins of the sons usually
fall on the father. Few literary movements produced so many dreadful
poems so quickly as Seventies surrealism. The critics quickly turned
hostile. Editors got bored. And young poets soon followed other
fashions. By 1980, most of the elder ringleaders had moved on to
something new. Robert Bly was fostering the Men's movement. Donald
Justice returned to rhyme and meter. Donald Hall began writing nature
poems. But Tate stayed faithful to his original style, and he soon
became a convenient whipping boy for the failings of the entire
movement.
While
Tate never lacked defenders, the critical tide had turned. The late
Seventies and early Eighties were hard years for him. Each book
occasioned some new outburst of critical bile. "The poems [in Viper
Jazz]," wrote one reviewer, "occupy the tenuous borderland between
nonsense and disaster." "Verbal doodling," declared another critic
about the bizarrely titled 1979 volume, Riven Doggeries.
"Simply monotonous" intoned a third review about Constant Defender,
in 1981, adding that "Tate's development since The Lost Pilot
has been predominantly negative."
Tate,
alas, was not blameless in creating the impression of artistic decline.
Young, self-confident and successful, he had been immensely prolific
without being even modestly self-critical. In 1979 by the age of
35, Tate had published twenty-four books and pamphlets–a rate
of production that makes Anthony Trollope look lazy. The original
French surrealists had espoused "automatic writing" to unlock the
depths of the subconscious. To Tate's detractors, his voluminous
output seemed like automatic writing of an altogether shoddier kind.
After
a decade of critical chastisement, it is probably not coincidental
that the Eighties found a more prudent and self-critical poet. During
this decade Tate published only two full-length books and a pair
of pamphlets. (He has kept a similarly deliberate pace thus far
into the Nineties.) And slowly but inexorably, his critical reputation
has risen. No longer part of a fashionable movement, Tate has emerged
more clearly as a truly individual poet. His quirky brilliant style
now appears not a timely pose but the authentic expression of an
original, if also idiosyncratic imagination.
Tate
now also seems like a survivor–one of the few genuine talents
among the many young stars of Po-Biz who enjoyed their fifteen minutes
of literary fame in the publicity-mad Seventies. "Bliss was it in
that dawn to be alive," but to be a young poet then was heaven.
Teaching jobs and publishers were plentiful. Small magazines started
up from coast to coast. Poetry readings became big events, and young
poets could aspire to modest celebrity. Each season some melancholy
young face would stare soulfully from the cover of the latest issue
of American Poetry Review, a journal dedicated to the principle
that a new author need not be talented, only photogenic.
Where
today are those bards of yesteryear? Teaching somewhere, presumably–and
at a good salary–but for the most part no longer much read
or remembered. But Tate is still thriving. While he has never been
a popular poet among general readers, his small audience of admirers
has been growing steadily. And his critical rehabilitation is now
complete. In 1991 he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the William
Carlos Williams Award, and in 1995 he received the National Book
Award (for which, I must now confess in the interest of full disclosure,
I was a judge). And more prizes followed. Although each award helped
rebuild his critical reputation, the turning point for Tate was
winning the Pulitzer for his 1991 Selected Poems. This compact
but comprehensive volume has just been issued in the U.K. by Carcanet–the
first time the poet has been published by a British press. If ever
a poet needed a selected volume, it is the prolific, problematic
Tate. Reprinting 160 poems from the author's huge body of work,
the Carcanet volume provides a manageable overview to the elusive
innovator.
Reading
Tate's Selected Poems, one finds a consistently witty, inventive,
and weird imagination at work. It may sound odd to call a surrealist
charming, but there is a strangely seductive quality to Tate's poetry,
a suavely manic energy directed toward inscrutable ends. Tate also
has the gift for enigmatic parables. Here, for example, is a very
short poem from his 1976 collection Viper Jazz that satirizes
the narcissism of writers. The poem is called "Teaching the Ape
to Write Poems."
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
They
didn't have much trouble
teaching
the ape to write poems:
first
they strapped him into the chair,
then
tied the pencil around his hand
(the
paper had already been nailed down).
Then
Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and
whispered into his ear:
"You
look like a god sitting there.
Why
don't you try writing something?"
Tate
is often funny and always fun to read, even in the nihilistic poems
that make up a good portion of the volume. A reader may find Tate's
poetry difficult, opaque, or pointless, but no one who loves language
will find him boring. Line by line, sentence by sentence, he strives
to keep the reader interested and amused.
Rereading
the Selected Poems, however, one also notices the limitations
of Tate's achievement. While the poems are consistently lively and
ingenious, they are also mostly very similar. The weird juxtaposition
of disparate images, the brilliant non-sequiturs, the dead-pan narration
of apocalyptic events, and the inconclusive endings recur in poem
after poem. No matter how well performed, the same tricks of unpredictability
become predictable. While Tate's poetry is never quite monotonous,
when read in large portions, the work seems strangely homogeneous.
There
is also little sense of artistic development evident in the Selected
Poems. Tate discovered his individual style early, and except
for some minor variations, he has persisted with it over the last
thirty years. A few poems in The Lost Pilot strike an autobiographical
note and have a more or less expository organization, but virtually
all of the others have a nearly identical feel and texture. There
is also little change in focus from book to book. The same dark
themes of dislocation and alienation, of external violence and internal
entropy cry out in the early poems and echo throughout the subsequent
volumes. For better and for worse, Tate is a poet of obsessive concerns.
Finally,
I have one more serious reservation. Despite its surface brilliance,
stylistic originality, and consistent invention, Tate's poetry often
fails to make a deep emotional and intellectual connection with
the reader. It isn't just matter of accessibility (though Tate's
habitual avoidance of logical structure, his aversion to psychological
realism, and his instinctive denial of conventional meaning surely
contribute to the problem). Difficult poetry can be deeply communicative.
The great Modernists like Pound, Eliot, Cummings, and Stevens demonstrated
how powerfully complex poetry can speak to the common reader. They
understood, however, that if a poem renounces the obvious pleasures
of clarity and overt coherence, it must then provide the compensation
of strong subliminal communication. In the best poetry, even if
the reader doesn't always understand the surface meaning of a text,
he or she intuitively feels the emotional power of the subtext.
In
Tate's work, however, there hardly seems to be a subtext–only
marvelously crafted but enigmatic surfaces. Whatever deeper meaning
the poems have–if, indeed, they do cohere at a deeper level–remains
largely inaccessible to the reader. Tate provides vivid and abundant
images but no intuitive sense of their relation to one another.
A reader can witness Tate's dreamscapes but rarely enter them fully.
Rereading Tate's Selected Poems to prepare for this broadcast,
I was reminded of the Austrian Expressionist, Georg Trakl, who died
during the first World War. Trakl is an opaque and hermetic poet
of extraordinary originality–a far more challenging poet in
many ways than Tate. Yet, as one studies Trakl's richly lyric work,
the poems acquire powerful resonance and meaning. Text and subtext
cohere for the reader–intuitively, emotionally, intellectually.
Even if the reader is at a loss to paraphrase the literal meaning
of a poem, he or she feels it holistically. In comparison, Tate
remains deliberately elusive. Not only the author disappears behind
these poems but also ultimately the poems themselves–vanishing
like the Cheshire Cat behind its own sly smile.
And
yet, what would Wonderland be without a Cheshire Cat? Although James
Tate's work can be frustratingly evanescent, it provides abundant
pleasures all its own. And if contemporary poetry needs to get more
serious about anything, it is pleasure.
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